The New Yorker doesn’t feature fiction set in Atlanta very often, but it did so this June with “The Luck of Kokura” by Gary Shteyngart. Barry Cohen, the protagonist of the story, is a hedge fund manager who flees a complicated life in Manhattan and probable insider trading charges, riding the “Hound” (Greyhound bus) to Atlanta and crashing the apartment of a former employee who lives there. “Crashing” captures the spontaneity but not the flavor of his stay, as the former employee Jeff Park lives in a “palatial” 4,000-square-foot luxury condo downtown with a “frigate-size couch” and a button-operated Lutron window shades ($350+ each), wears Lanvin sneakers ($500+) and a “seven-figure” Rolex watch, drives both a Ferrari California and a Bentley ($200,000+ apiece) and parks in special VIP zones for luxury cars. Barry’s own obsession with luxury watches seems the ultimate in conspicuous consumption in an era when time is incorporated into cell phones. Some Atlanta-New York comparisons seem odd (how is the BeltLine like the High Line?), but a focus on Atlanta’s conspicuous consumption seems right on. As does its focus on the haves and the have-nots, those who are lucky and those who are not.

$3490 cocktail dress, Tom Ford, Shops of Buckhead (Atlanta)

$5.99 cocktail dress, Goodwill, Tucker (Atlanta)

Shteyngart’s opening reference to a Keith Haring painting hanging in Jeff Park’s Atlanta apartment and the premise of the financial trader in free fall immediately evoke the 1980s and, at least to me, the blockbuster novel that satirized that era, Tom Wolfe’s Bonfire of the Vanities (1987). “Luck” takes place during the 2016 Republican convention Continue reading Atlanta and the Bonfire of the Vanities

An American white and a non-American black read Jean Toomer’s Cane (1923) and all this is brought to life through an encounter with Oluwamuyiwa Winifred Adebayo

Reading is listening to the words of others. I picked up Jean Toomer’s Cane to hear words from an old rural black Georgia that was still touched by slavery, a root of present-day race relations. As a white outsider who did not know the South when I moved to Atlanta in 2005, I was looking for an inside view. What I found was an appreciation for black beauty and a deeper realization that I cannot know what it is like to live in a black body.

I had missed my chance to talk about Cane to Dr. Rudolph P. Byrd , founder of the James Weldon Johnson Institute for the Study of Race and Difference, Emory College of Arts and Sciences (see excellent video here), who was on faculty at the Emory’s Graduate Institute of the Liberal Arts, where I’d come to study. He was at the time co-editing a new edition of Cane, and he died in 2011, the year it was published. I remember Dr. Byrd’s elegant dress and demeanor from passing in the halls.

If there was ever a time to speak of love – love of each other, of nature, of country – that time is now. Geoffrey Chaucer, one of the first poets to write in English (rather than the elite Latin or French), shows us a way to speak of it in Parliament of Fowls, his exquisite tribute to love and mating.

I was reminded of Parliament early one morning last year while driving through my neighborhood with the windows rolled down. A raucous chorus of birds called out, and I turned to see a crowd of them gathered on a lawn as if holding a meeting of some kind. The fact that it was near Valentine’s Day made it all the more fitting.

Pauleen Eccles, A Parliament of Rooks (licensed for reuse by Creative Commons)

Chaucer’s poem celebrates birds of all kinds who gather annually on Saint Valentine’s Day in the garden of the Goddess of Love’s temple to pick their mates.